Uncertain Updates: June 2025
Well, I finally did it.
I finished revising Chapter 2 of Fundamental Uncertainty.
If you’ve been following along, it’s been a long process. I started revising that chapter back in November and finished earlier this month. During that time I had a lot of setbacks: I lost my mom, I got a concussion, and I started a new job. All these things slowed down what was an already incredibly difficult rewrite. I easily spent 100 hours on this chapter trying to figure out just the right things to say in the right way, and I threw away 5 words for every 1 that made it to the end. Thankfully, I’ve finally got a version that, while not perfect, is good enough that I’m moving on.
Unlike most of my second draft chapters, the new version of Chapter 2 was so much better and such a big change that I decided to publish it into the first draft. You can read the new version here.
And in further good news, the revision of Chapter 3 is nearly complete. It’s going a lot faster because it was the second chapter I wrote and it’s where I started to figure out what the book should be. The new version cut about 1000 unnecessary words and fixes a number of factual errors in the first draft (thanks to everyone on Less Wrong who pointed out issues in the first draft!).
My hope is that the revisions of Chapter 4 and on go even faster.
I also hope that I’m still on track to wrap up the second draft by the end of the year, with a goal of getting into print in 2026.
Posting More Often
I’m planning to start posting to this blog once a week. This is the third week in a row I’ve made a Wednesday post, and I hope to keep that up.
Everyone says consistency is what matters for growing an audience, and like it or not if I want people to read my book I need an audience.
I’ve got a lot of things I could post, especially if I don’t spend long hours editing them. These more frequent posts will probably be about 20% worse than my current non-update posts in terms of polish, but will come 200% more often. I hope you like the tradeoff, and apologies in advance if you don’t.
Other things
I spared you all this bad filk I wrote a couple weeks ago. I wrote some better ones, but of course filk is a low art, so it’s all bad.
And I keep posting on Twitter. Sometimes I’m even clever. I recently broke 800 followers. Maybe you will help take me to 1000???
